Awful design at Skype

As Skype has evolved over the years, I’ve gotten the impression they’ve hired a bunch of visual designers and told them:

Hey, go make the site look like the other sites out there. You know, BIG and spacey, like Apple! Web 2.0, right? And throw in some icons and progress bars. And gradients. Oh, and tabs!

Here’s the awful mess of a result of visual design sans usability design.

This is the “dashboard” of the Skype Manager. I have absolutely no idea what information it’s trying to communicate to me. But hey, the manager at Skype can check off, “Have a Dashboard, like everybody else!” off his list.